Item found in search does not contain the search term

[Decidedly Devious]

I went to my Trash folder for one account to delete all the old emails from Figaro's Pizza.
I entered figaro into the search box and was about to delete the messages when I noticed one from Apple was included.

I saw nothing even close to figaro in the message, so I unchecked the filters one-by-one, and the only one left was Body.

As you can see, there is nothing even remotely resembling figaro in the body of this email, so why does it appear in the search results?

T-bird 38.6
OS X 10.11.3

[DanRaisch]

How is the account set up in Thunderbird, as POP or IMAP? Find out using menu path Tools->Account Settings->Server Settings->Server Type at the top right of the dialogue.

[Decidedly Devious]

POP

[DanRaisch]

First, backup your Profile ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup )

Create a new sub-folder under Local Folders. Move all of the messages currently in your Inbox to that new subfolder.

Confirm that you have made the recommended backup of your Profile.

Close Thunderbird and navigate to your Profile folder. Delete both the file Inbox.msf and the file Inbox with no extension.

Restart Thunderbird and you should find a new, empty Inbox folder in place. Copy any messages you MUST have in your Inbox from the sub-folder created above to the Inbox. Compact the Inbox after those messages are copied in.

The "Real Fix" entry in this article -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders#Real_fix also describes this process.

[makaiguy]

If that doesn't get it, next thing I'd do if it happened to me would be to load the source code of that message (Ctrl+U) then do a search (Ctrl+F) for figaro to see if it shows in some non-displayed code.

[Decidedly Devious]

Dan,

Couple things:

First of all your instructions didn't say to navigate to the Mail folder inside the Profile folder.
Second, as I said, the issue occurred in the Trash folder, not the Inbox. I could follow the Real Fix procedure for that folder if necessary.
Third, as you know, T-bird comes configured with Compact Folders enabled by default, so doing it manually shouldn't be necessary but I did it anyway; same thing happened when I searched for figaro again.




makaiguy,

I had checked out the full header but not the message source. I just did that and it said phrase not found.

[DanRaisch]

Since there is no Inbox or Trash folder at the top level of the profile I guess I've given folks credit for being industrious and locating those files in the Mail directory. Keep in mind that if they have more than one POP type account they even have to figure out which of the sub-folders of Mail to work in. Perhaps that's a bit too much to ask of them? I'll update the instructions.

Compacting is intended to reduce the incidence of problems but may not prevent them is the trigger threshold is too high, as I believe the default 20MB certainly is.

[Decidedly Devious]

Yeah, I set mine to 2 MB long ago.